The Verbs “are”, “was” and “were”

Objective: Use “are”, “was” and “were” to construct sentences. This is going to be our last instalment on the “Be” verbs. The English sentence patterns that we shall look at here are very common. Further, they provide a problem to speakers of English because they require the subject and verb to agree in number. The “are” verb agrees with you, we, they and the names of more than two people or the names of two or more things e.g. Tom and Jerry. The resulting sentences will be 1) You are playing. 2) We are writing. 3) They are sick. 4) Tom and Jerry are rivals. 5) The houses are beautiful. Well, try and write as many sentences as you can but make sure that your subjects are similar to mine, especially for sentences 1), 2) and 3). “Was” is the past tense of is. All the sentences in which we had used “is” can be written using “was”. What will be different is the time the activities take place. You can go back to the lesson on “is” and borrow the sentences you had used there then replace is with was. Your sentences will look like these: 1) John was ill. 2) She was a teacher. 3) He was late. 4) Jane was an athlete. 5) He was cruel. You can extend this pattern to use verbs ending in –ing. 1) Jane was teaching. 2) He was running. 3) She was eating. 4) He was bathing. 5) She was painting. Now make as many sentences as you can following this pattern. Finally “were” is the past tense of “are". We can therefore replace are in the sentences above with were. 1) You were playing. 2) We were writing. 3) They were sick. 4) Tom and Jerry were rivals. 5) The houses were beautiful. I hope that you have enjoyed working with these sentence patterns. Remember that success comes out of effort. You have to write many sentences every day. In the next post we shall look at main verbs.